January312013

In August of 1966, 2 years prior to the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick wrote to the vice president of his production company and asked whether IBM — a company with whom Kubrick consulted during production, and whose logo briefly appears in the film — were aware of HAL’s murderous actions in the story. His letter, and Roger Caras’s reply, can be seen below.

It’s worth noting that both Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke have since denied that HAL represented IBM, and have claimed that the “one-letter shift” between the names “HAL” and “IBM” is purely coincidental.

June282012

So then imagine Alan Turingstein, mathematics genius, computer
pioneer, and Nazi code expert. After the war, he messes around in the
German electronics industry in some inconclusive way, and then he
commits suicide in some obscure morals scandal. What would we think of
Alan Turingstein today, on his centenary? I doubt we’d be celebrating
him, and secretly telling ourselves that we’re just like him.

On
the contrary, we’d consider him a sinister figure, somebody to be
whispered about. He’d be a spooky, creepy villain, a weird eccentric
with ragged fingernails and pants held up with twine. He would show up
in World War II historical novels as a scary fringe character. As for
the famous Turingstein Test, which I’m about to discuss at length, we
wouldn’t see that as a fun metaphysical thought experiment. Those
interesting ideas would also bear the taint of Nazi culture, and we’d
probably consider the Turing Test some kind of torture chamber for
intelligent machines.

Now, Turing had the good luck not to be born
German, but he also had the bad luck of being a consistently eccentric,
shadowy, obscure, cooped-up and closeted guy. Furthermore, I believe
our world has many such people right now — few so brilliant as him, but
many as isolated as him. Rather than apologizing to Alan Turing after
his death, I’d be happier if we had some working way to reach out to
other Alan Turings, ways to find people like him and to convince them to
put down the poisoned apple and find good, sensible reasons to cheer
the hell up and enjoy life.

We have no way to know which Alan
Turings among us will leave a grand legacy like his: technological
advance, the Allied victory and the persistence so far of liberty,
racial tolerance and democratic capitalism. We do have plenty of geeks
who are just as obsessive and hung-up on weird hacks as he was. While
we’re somewhat more inclined to valorize them, I don’t think we meet
their needs very well.

We’re okay with certain people who “think
different” to the extent of buying Apple iPads. We’re rather hostile
toward people who “think so very differently” that their work will make
no sense for thirty years — if ever. We’ll test them, and see if we can
find some way to get them to generate wealth for us, but we’re not
considerate of them as unusual, troubled entities wandering sideways
through a world they never made.

So, let me talk a little bit
about Turing’s famous test for intelligence, the “imitation game.”
Everybody thinks they know what that is: it’s a man talking to a
computer, and the computer is trying to convince him that he’s not a
machine, he’s a man. If he talks like a man and knows what a man knows,
if he presents as a man, then we don’t have to get into the dark
metaphysical issues of what’s going on in his black-box heart and
spirit; the machine keeps up the façade, so therefore he’s one of us,
he’s perfectly fine. That’s the Turing Test as it’s commonly described.

However,
that’s by no means what Turing actually says in his original paper on
the subject. The real Turing imitation game is not about that process at
all. It’s about an entirely different process of gender politics and
transvestism. It’s about a machine imitating a woman.

In the
original Turing imitation game, you’ve got three entities: a judge, a
woman, and a machine pretending to be a woman. Alan Turing says he can’t
answer the question “can machines think” because he doesn’t want to
waste time with the popular definitions of “machinery” and “thinking.”
He wants a simpler, more rigorous test that’s more objective and
reliable. So what he actually comes up with is a test for a machine with
a woman’s sensibility.

This is a card puncher, an integral part of the tabulation system used by the United States Census Bureau to compile the thousands of facts gathered by the Bureau. Holes are punched in the card according to a prearranged code transferring the facts from the census questionaire into statistics.